Stoozing with YNAB

Lennys_Shinpad

Hi, I have been stoozing for well over a decade now. I have recently started managing my finances using YNAB. It works really well when I am buying things with my current account but I cannot think of a workaround to use it for stoozing. Has anyone on here managed to find a way to combine YNAB with stoozing (that is fairly automatic)? Would be great if there was a way.

Thanks,

James.

marycanary

Hi,

I manage it by having Stoozing activity as tracking accounts so it doesn't impact my budget accounts. I don't do as much Stoozing as I used to, but I think it might be worth starting again. If I go into it in a big way again I might set up a second budget in YNAB to manage it that way and run it like I do my very small business.

Lennys_Shinpad

Hi,

Thanks for the response. Glad you have found a way that works for you. Just checking then, do you do as follows:

1 - set up credit card as an unlinked account
2 - make payments on the credit card
3 - transfer money from your current account to stooze account to cover the transactions
4 - in YNAB, manually allocate the current account outflow to the relevant category

Is that how you would go about it? Ideally, I want something that removes the hassle of steps 3 and 4. Using YNAB with my current account pretty-much eliminates these two steps and makes it much simpler for me.

Thanks,

James.

bnabound

@Lennys_Shinpad - just came across this thread and wondered whether you've found a way to make stoozing work with YNAB? 
I've created a test budget to play around with this but I somehow can't wrap my head around how to best implement it. If you have found a solution, I'd appreciate it if you could share

morgmonster

Realise this is a little old but I have been using YNAB for years and have been stoozing since last autumn, so thought I'd share what I do. The way I do it is a little simpler than you're making it, and I don't do step 4. Have you had a credit card on YNAB before so understand how it deals with them? Important to realise that each credit card has its own category in your budget, AND its own account in the accounts tab.

So I have a Credit card, Current account and a Savings account. So if I need to buy £100 groceries at Tesco:

Pay £100 on the credit card and enter it into YNAB - this means YNAB takes £100 out of the groceries category and adds it to the credit card category, this is how YNAB deals with all credit card payments.

Transfer £100 from my current account to my savings account, and enter the transaction into YNAB. Transfers don't have a category assigned.

That's it. 

Gradually the amount assigned to the credit card in the Budget section increases - I suggest every now and then making sure it matches with the amount on the credit card in the Accounts section. Then you just need to make sure that the amount in the savings account is always equal or more than the amount on the credit card, in the Accounts tab of YNAB.

Every month when the minimum payment is taken from the current account, you just do a transfer from current account to the credit card account in the accounts tab (and if you want to move money from the savings account to the current account to cover it, you can do that too). That will then reduce the amount in the credit card budget category. 

If you wanted to, you could set up the savings account as a tracking account, but it shouldn't make a difference. Once you've spent on the credit card the money is moved from the grocery / clothes / pub budget category to the credit card budget category. So you can't accidentally spend it unless you deliberately move it from the cc budget category. 

Then when you eventually pay off the card in full from your savings account; transfer from savings account to credit card in YNAB, and the credit card budget category should go to zero.

I have 2 stoozing cards and it's worked fine this way for the past 9m or so. That means 2 budget categories and 2 cc accounts, (just one savings account) but it's the same principle as for just one card.

bnabound

This is so helpful, thank you very much @morgmonster!